GDP, Revised 4Q15 And Forecast 1Q16 -- February 26, 2016

From Financial Times:

The US economy ended the year on a stronger footing than expected, providing some reassurance as the global outlook falters.

Expansion was unexpectedly revised to a 1 per cent annualised pace in the fourth quarter from 0.7 per cent, the Commerce Department said on Friday in its second estimate of how the economy performed. A downward revision to 0.4 per cent had been forecast.

A robust jobs market and still rising house prices are providing the ballast for an economy that’s facing weaker growth overseas, a sharp contraction in its manufacturing sector and retrenchment in the once booming oil industry.

The bulk of the surprise revision was down to companies accumulating stockpiles at a faster pace than estimated in the reading – a typically powerful variable in revisions.

Maybe that's what President Obama was working on this past weekend: massaging the 4Q15 GDP numbers. 

Maybe Yellen can raise rates again.

GDPNow, latest forecast, 2.1%, February 26, 2016:

The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2016 is 2.1 percent on February 26, down from 2.5 percent on February 25.

The forecast for first-quarter real consumer spending growth increased from 3.1 percent to 3.5 percent following this morning’s personal income and outlays release from the U.S Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). This was more than offset by a downward revision of the contribution of inventory investment to first-quarter real GDP growth from 0.2 percentage points to -0.4 percentage points after this morning's GDP release from the BEA.

Yes, I think she can.

And durable orders jump. From Yahoo/AP:

Orders to U.S. companies for long-lasting manufactured goods advanced in January at the strongest pace in 10 months. Moreover, a key category that tracks business investment surged by the largest amount in 19 months.The bigger-than-expected gains could be a sign of better days ahead for the nation's beleaguered manufacturers.

Orders for durable goods, items ranging from autos and appliances to steel and machinery, rose 4.9 percent last month, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

That represented a rebound from a 4.6 percent plunge in December and a 0.5 percent decline in November.

Demand in a category that serves as a proxy for business investment plans rose 3.9 percent in January, reversing a 3.7 percent fall in December. It was the biggest advance in this category since June 2014.

 Now I know she can.

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Notes for the Granddaughters

Word Of The Day

I keep a list of words I find in my daily reading that might be of interest to our oldest granddaughter. While driving from event to event to event, we often get the list out and go over some of the words.

The other day we revisited the Dallas Museum of Art, our second visit in two weeks. My wife had missed something I wanted her to see, so we went back.

Specifically I wanted her to see the Wittgenstein Vitrine and the Coco Chanel / Reves collection. The vitrine was a glass display case made in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century.  My wife, being the smarter of the two of us, "guessed" the translation of "vitrine" but never thought much about it after that. We moved on.

Then, last night, while reading a book in The New York Review of Books I came across this:

To make porcelain proper ("hardpaste" porcelain, as opposed to imitation "soft-paste"), you need to blend a white clay with a powdered rock. The two substances, each usually alumino-silicate in compositon, will fuse and vitrify when fired at extremely high temperatures to deliver a translucent and heat-resistant product. Kaolin, the clay to use, takes its name from the veins of it found at Mount Kaoling, some forty miles outside the city of Jingdezhen, which is itself three hundred miles southest of Shanghai.

"Vitrify" is one of those words you think you've seen everywhere and should know the definition but don't. Vitrify. Sort of like Spotify. Rectify. Electrify. But my wife, who is even more knowledgeable than I on things like this, said she had not heard the word "vitrify" before.

So, there you have it. The word of the day: vitrify. Vitrification (from Latin vitreum, "glass" via French vitrifier) is the transformation of a substance into a glass, that is to say a non-crystalline amorphous solid. In ceramics it gives impermeability to water. -- Wiki.

Vitrine: the history of "vitrine" is clear as glass. It comes to English by way of the Old French word vitre, meaning "pane of glass," from Latin vitrum, meaning "glass." "Vitrum" has contributed a number of words to the English language besides "vitrine." "Vitreous" ("resembling glass" or "relating to, derived from, or consisting of glass") is the most common of these. "Vitrify" ("to convert or become converted into glass or into a glassy substance by heat and fusion") is another. A much rarer "vitrum" word - and one that also entered English by way of "vitre" - is vitrailed, meaning "fitted with stained glass." -- Merriam Webster.

And that would be it, except of course, there's more. When I saw that vitrification results in a "heat-resistant product" I immediately thought of fracking.

And then it came to me.

When going through the FracFocus reports, I often see aluminum-silicate (or some variation in spelling) among the proppants used. Lo and behold, from ceramics.org, December 15, 2011:

Developments in horizontal drilling technology offer unprecedented access to domestic oil and natural gas deposits, thereby placing the United States on the verge of sustained energy independence. Critical to this technology are spherical ceramic aggregates, known as proppants, which are used for enhancing oil and gas recovery from hydrofractured wells.

However, ceramic proppants are derived from sintered aluminosilicates such as bauxite, which is becoming increasingly scarce in the quality and quantities necessary to meet market demand for proppants.

This presentation summarizes our development and commercialization of glass ceramic proppants from alternative raw materials derived from industrial waste streams. These proppants, manufactured from basalt-based mine tailings and drill cuttings from shale gas wells, rival sintered bauxite-based proppants with regard to strength, hardness, specific gravity and conductivity in industry standard testing. Progression from laboratory demonstration to large scale processing and commercialization of these proppants is discussed.

Sintering is the process of compacting and forming a solid mass of material by heat and/or pressure without melting it to the point of liquefaction. Sintering happens naturally in mineral deposits or as a manufacturing process used with metals, ceramics, plastics, and other materials.

As long as I've digressed this long, I might as well as something else. Our oldest granddaughter loves geology and rocks and gems, precious and semi-precious. Corundum is considered the second hardest mineral, second only to diamond. Corundum is a crystalline form of aluminum oxide. Corundrum can come in many colors (due to "impurities"). Transparent corunum are used as gems. Keeping simple, all aluminum oxide gems are called corundum with one exception: ruby. A ruby is a red conrundum. There is one more exception, but one does not come across it often in the literature: padparadscha, which is pink-orange.

And yes, corundum is commonly found among the proppants used in fracking.

Wow. So much for Sophia, our 19-month-old, to learn.

[A reader noted: Hebron, ND, is known for Hebron brick, which are mainly sold in the  Midwest, but sold all over America. The company located there because of deposits of kaolin. Some readers may remember this article on kaolin and how it might be used in fracking, over at prairiebizmagazine.]